Rep. Tim Joseph's rise to prominence in Ithaca may just complete the 180-degree shift in this area's political landscape over the past 30 years.

In the early 1970s, Ithaca's Common Council and the then-Tompkins County Board of Supervisors were dominated by the Republican Party.

Joseph was a self-described hippie, an undergraduate government major at Cornell University and an activist.

Since that time, Republicans in the county's urban core have ceded their majorities to the Democratic Party.

And Joseph, 51, married for 20 years and the father of two, holds the highest elected office in the county legislature.

But he still considers himself an activist.

"My values haven't changed, just my tactics," Joseph said as he sat in his low-ceilinged Elm Street living room, furnished with two sleeping dogs, a wood stove and a stereo with a turntable that looks like it's still in use.

"I think a significant part of the change (in Ithaca's political atmosphere) has to do with people coming to Cornell, being political activists on campus and staying," Joseph said.

His own biography is one case in point.

Joseph grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, until he was 15, when his family moved to suburban Chicago. He arrived in Ithaca into a climate of political unrest, one year after student activists commandeered Willard Straight Hall.

It was a climate in which he certainly felt comfortable.

Joseph himself participated in the 1972 anti-war takeover of Cornell's Carpenter Hall.

Shortly thereafter, he said, he found himself in the middle of a full-fledged riot on College Avenue.

"The fliers said there was going to be a block party, and it so happened that the block listed on the party was the one that I lived on," he said.

The party wasn't authorized, and, Joseph said, "The state police were there, just waiting for something to happen."

Joseph framed the confrontation that followed: "It was like they were saying, 'We know you're the same trouble-makers who took over Carpenter Hall, and we're not going to let you get away with this twice.'"

Police tried to disperse illegal revelers, and a conflict ensued. Joseph's home became an ad-hoc eyewash station for students suffering the effects of tear gas.

But neither he nor the partygoers engaged in passive resistance, he admitted. "We picked up the tear gas and threw it back at them," he said.

He was not charged by police in that incident.

But his activism did land him in jail for one night. It was a 1974 sidewalk sit-down protest in front of the White House.

"It (an anti-war protest) was organized by the Quakers," he said. "The idea was to get hundreds of people arrested every day," by sitting on the sidewalk until police had to move them. That's just what they had to do to Joseph, who was charged with "incommoding a sidewalk." The charges were dropped before his court date, he said.

Changes in tactics

As the 1980s began and he put down roots in Tompkins County, he and a number of contemporaries continued their activism through political campaigns.

Joseph was an early supporter of the progressive Citizens Party, and campaigned for presidential candidate Barry Commoner.

His first bid for elected office was an unsuccessful run in 1982 for State Assembly on the Citizens Party line.

The next year, he challenged Republican Frank Proto for a seat on the Tompkins County Board of Representatives, and lost.

It wasn't until 1993 that he was appointed to the Board of Representatives to finish the term of Deborah Dietrich, a Democrat who resigned.

He was appointed in the same year that Democrats first gained a majority in county government.

On the Board of Representatives, he served as chairman of the county's Budget and Capital Projects committee for six years.

His appointment to the chairmanship followed the political retirement of Rep. Barbara Mink, D-City of Ithaca, who held the post for five years.

Joseph's colleagues elected him chairman on Jan. 2.

He said that his focus will be on improving or changing the delivery of health care and human services in the county.

"Our goal here is not just to give someone housing, or get someone fed. Our goal is to make them a productive member of the community," he said.

It's unclear how much such a holistic approach to human services would cost, but Joseph will argue that his way will, in the long run, be cheaper than saving money now on ineffective programs to which people must frequently return.

Joseph was a champion of the county's deeper foray into Alternatives to Incarceration programs, the 2001 initiative that proposed spending $1 million to keep nonviolent criminals out of the already overcrowded Tompkins County jail.

With the expanded programs in place for less than one year, some county Republicans have expressed nervousness about whether the investment will pay off.

"But you will have to make a choice," he said, "Between spending $1 million on a program or $10 million on a new jail. It's true. And that's how I hope to convince people."

This story, perhaps indavertantly, does a pretty good job of explaining how Ithaca became "the City of Evil."

"I think a significant part of the change (in Ithaca's political atmosphere) has to do with people coming to Cornell, being political activists on campus and staying," Joseph said.

The hippies, rather than being stamped out, were allowed to fester, breed and ultimately take over, beginning with the takeover of the Willard Straight Building by armed protesters, continuing with the takeover of Carpenter Hall and leading us where we are today.

Joseph's own little anecdote is a good example:

Police tried to disperse illegal revelers, and a conflict ensued. Joseph's home became an ad-hoc eyewash station for students suffering the effects of tear gas.

But neither he nor the partygoers engaged in passive resistance, he admitted. "We picked up the tear gas and threw it back at them," he said.

He was not charged by police in that incident.

After incidents such as these, the far left figure out that Ithaca was a safe haven and began to flock here.

And lest anyone think that the years have mellowed their leftist beliefs:

Joseph is a member of the county board. A self-proclaimed radical, he's also-like Dan Hoffman and former mayor Nichols-a hardworking pragmatist who loves the nitty-gritty details of politics ("90 percent of what we do is not ideological," he says). In the mid-'80s, Joseph worked for OAR as a counselor and a trainer of counselors. Part of the training was work in "deep listening." Four years ago, when a conservative taxpayers' group was hectoring the county board for its alleged free-spending ways, Joseph and fellow progressive board member Eric Lerner decided to listen to their opponents instead of simply struggling against them. They did more; they invited the tax protesters to sit on an advisory committee. "We came to respect each other," says Joseph. "And the protesters discovered they had to grapple with real funding problems instead of abstractions about fiscal responsibility."

Thanks for posting a link to Utne Reader's article that Ithaca is the most "enlightened" town in America. Given that we know what "enlightened" means to readers of Utne, and given Utne's own description of Ithaca this is the official proof that Ithaca, not Berkley, not Madison, etc. IS the OFFICIAL "City of Evil."

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